


Argue/Augment

by karanguni



Category: Final Fantasy VII (OGC)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-03
Updated: 2010-07-03
Packaged: 2017-10-10 08:56:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/97893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karanguni/pseuds/karanguni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The only way to live is to cross every line.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Argue/Augment

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



Rufus was a rich boy, an inheritor, a spoiled scion of the only truly moneyed family the world knew; that was probably what saved him the day that WEAPON slammed itself into the girders of his office and threw the relics of his father's time against the walls.

Pain was very mental for Rufus. It didn't necessarily have to hurt to _sear_; pain was the white-hot edge of time ticking away. Opportunity cost. While he watched WEAPON's cannon blast blaze closer, Rufus didn't see his past flash past his sights. Rufus' near death experience was the future: the mocking, awning chasm into which all the money and all the power and all the freedom could've been poured, if he lived.

Rufus ducked. WEAPON hit.

If Rufus had been anyone else, staying alive would have been a pointless ambition. If Rufus had been a Turk, what would he have done? Breathe? Breathe through _this_ kind of pain? The light-or-radiation-or-heat - they all blended together in a simple orgasm of physics towards the end - during impact erased molecules from the triple-layered protection wrapped around the office windows. Rufus had had it reinforced after Sephiroth carved into Shinra Building and his father, but even his paranoia wasn't enough to stop the world from trying to end.

The first part of Rufus that cleaved was his legs. He was under the desk behind the far wall, but it didn't make much of a difference to a blast of that scale. The metal scaffolding of the desk collapsed and threw him out, spitting him towards the open corridor where the doors and anything not bolted down had been flung. Smoke was everywhere: black and white and a thousand other colours to Rufus' jumped up vision. He could feel the building groan in time with his own breathing.

Turks didn't die easy, Rufus thought mildly as he felt the flooring start to sway. He knew, after all. Trying to do away with Veld had resulted in his own exile and neatly executed bribery. Turks responded to invasion with invasion; if you hit them they hit back twice as hard. Rufus knew that from experience as well; Tseng hit so beautifully, if you could incite him to strike.

No point. Turks wouldn't survive this. There was nothing to respond to, just fire and the agony of facts, facts, and weren't Turks fucking good at _facts_ as well. Sit at their knee long enough and you learned a great deal about _detail_. Fact: Rufus was over sixty stories in the air. Fact: the elevators would not be functioning. Fact: so much of him hurt that the only thing he could feel was the visceral chug of endorphins and serotonin through his endocrine system as his body tried to let him die a chemically happy death. Fact: the world was burning.

The logical retaliation would be to opt to die. Find some vent of smoke and inhale until he passed out instead of waiting for some other major organ to writhe through a 15-point dance of death.

But all that was in Rufus veins was the refined poison of his hormones, built up over ages fifteen-to-twenty-too-old from when he was trapped at the top of a glass tower, locked into the strata of Junon's rising cityscape as he watched his father on television screens and hoped to god that the man burned.

Now the world was going up in carbon and jittery cries of short-circuiting electricity. The Shinra Company's building in flames, visible to the whole fucking world.

Rufus laughed until his tear ducts wept and cleared the soot from his eye. He got up. His saw, through blurry, soft vision, the white of his pants scuffed with dirt and debris. His feet were somewhere down there. He had his boots on. They were made for walking.

He hallucinated his way to the stairwell at the end of the corridor. Somewhere behind him there were support beams crashing and an orchestra pit worth of applause. The king is dead! Long live the king. Rufus had never liked this office anyway. The only good décor it had ever suffered was the reds of his father's blood. If he squinted, Rufus imagined he could see the old man now, laying prone behind him. Maybe he could've, if he'd bothered to look back.

Rufus found the door to the stairs by touch and pushed it open. The well was a tunnel of heat, air rising in molten, ballooning gushes. Rufus inhaled. Sweet dizziness. The fastest way down was to jump, but he wouldn't get far. Engineering, very humanely, had installed guards over the gaps of the stairs when some creative suicide had attempted to launch himself to a 40-storey death.

How Rufus got down to the fifties, he wouldn't recall later. Maybe he fell upwards through space. Maybe the staircase had heaved him down. Maybe he rolled, which would explain the bruises he had over and on top of (and under all around beneath) his burns. Maybe he flew. He was running out of oxygen, but he could still breathe.

He choked down the air. The stairwell was beginning to metamorphose into a strange visual paradox: when he went down it was like he was walking back up. The Lifestream, a professor in Junon had said, was a cycle. Inevitable and inescapable, it absorbs and produces energy. The ultimate argument for karma: what goes around comes around. Unless of course, the man tittered, you suck it all out as Mako.

'Shinra's so very good at sucking,' Rufus murmured to the stairwell door, his brain tick tick ticking through a Rolodex of memories as he spun the numbers together 69 68 67 66 65 64 63 62 61 60 59 58 57 56666666666666666 there. There. When he'd been young and vaguely non-sentient, Rufus Shinra had played a game with himself. He'd explored his home, starting from level 69 and going down down down down down down until he got tired.

He was tired, and he knew where he was. Rufus fell into the door, and the door fell down. Rufus picked himself up and was vaguely disappointed when the door didn't; this was Science territory, wasn't it, wasn't everything meant to be a little bit human here, enough to be monstrous? He stepped all over it just in case.

The air down here was better. The smoke trailed in with him, sliding between his legs to explore the tile and glass enclosures beyond. Rufus padded on after it, hypnotised by its ease of movement. His own gait was chopped. When he put his foot down there was a wet noise and a rising smell of copper.

'Here comes the prodigal son into my domain,' Hojo's ghost said. Rufus looked up at him and he was very clear; too clear to be real. His vision was fading fast, speckled by dots of blackness and entire star systems of pain, but the Professor stood out like a cut out from Rufus' memory.

'It figures that we'd meet in hell,' Rufus coughed, working his throat (raw) and his tongue (wet) and his jaw (stiff). He put a hand against the wall to support himself and felt his fingers slide down the glass, squeaking down and leaving blood everywhere. 'Professor.'

'You're out of your mind,' Hojo informed him. 'But you're operating so wonderfully that I assume it's not far from how your mind usually works. You were always so clever, Vice-President Shinra, and so stupid.'

'President,' Rufus corrected him, walking into another door until it gave way and let him in. 'President Shinra.'

Hojo sighed 'Your pride could have outlived an entire species.'

'Could,' Rufus corrected him again. 'Do you need lessons in grammar in your old age, Professor?'

'The boy still has spirit!' Hojo laughed, his voice just as cutting as Rufus knew it to be and for a while Rufus wished a curse on his own good memory. The things in his head were devils. 'Biologically speaking you need more than that to live, though. Haemoglobin, which you're losing a lot of, and oxygen, and a few less broken bones. I applaud you for coming this far,' Hojo clapped, his lab coat fluttering in a pain-fuelled breeze. 'You would have made a most interesting specimen.'

There was a terminal in front of him, with a faintly glowing keypad. Science. Science had a different set of generators than the rest of the building; they needed so much more auxiliary power. Numbers again. Numbers. 'I may still prove to be,' Rufus grunted to Hojo as he dug his fingernails into the keypad. Locks were moving in his head. Locks were moving.

A door hissed open. Hojo made a disapproving noise. 'Do you ever read warnings, President Shinra? It says _do not open_.'

'Your whole department is restricted,' Rufus laughed. 'Is it any wonder that I've tried to open all your doors?'

'Did you enjoy being a voyeur?' Hojo asked. 'Watching my little experiments?'

'Your mind is a Mobius strip,' Rufus spat. 'Twisted and complete.' He walked through Hojo and into the cool, welcoming punt of chemical air beyond the newly opened door. It was a different world in here. Green lights and the slow gurgle of viscous liquids. There were things in the dark.

'It didn't scare me when you violated my privacy.' Hojo reappeared at a console in the centre of the room. Rufus only wished he had that much mobility. The professor said, 'Your campaign to rule by fear instead of money had very little bearing on my department. It was unpolished, President Shinra, sloppy, significantly unsophisticated, simple.'

'Am I supposed to be alliterally ashamed?' Rufus juggled the syllables off his tongue. Slowing down. The world was slowing down. Hearing was diluted, a vortex of vibrations that his eardrums could no longer translate. Hojo's words were printing themselves on the back of Rufus' eyelids, which closed too often and took too much energy to wrench open.

'Villainy needs a better kind of villain,' Hojo reprimanded Rufus, watching as Rufus came closer by inches. 'In the course of a month you had the whole world's hate. Money and power versus a scale as large as the entire world? Even your father's generous coffers wouldn't have filled the void needed to sustain an obedient, terrified population.'

Rufus was directly in front of the console. He stood inside Hojo; the Professor was everywhere around him. 'What about your villainy?' Rufus sloppily pushed at the dials. 'Using genetic code as building bricks for an empire of new, isolate species?'

'You're cheaply sold on attention,' Hojo shrugged, the motion like someone walking over Rufus' grave. Rufus shivered. 'I'm cheaply sold on isolation and the freedom to do what I want. I have more of that than you do, boy,' the professor purred into his ear. Rufus' body jerked. Subjected to enough pain the body retaliates with pleasure. Flagellate yourself until you moan. Pain, to Rufus, was a mental thing. 'When you were a young terrorist in Hollander's day, you learned that lesson, didn't you?' Rufus' breaths were coming too fast. Overload. Overload. Press the red button.

Pistons hissed in the room. Something, somewhere, squelched and spat something out into the room.

Hojo said against Rufus' skin, 'SOLDIERs and kings have one thing in common, President Shinra: bloodlines.'

Rufus collapsed onto the floor, his back against the console and his eyes pinned to the darkness. Something was coming closer. Hojo sat down next to him. 'You have the freedom to rule the world, but what are you going to do with it even if you live?'

'What I want,' Rufus said. The thing was almost to him. 'That's all I wanted, want and will want. Blame my father for teaching me to operate on a larger scale than the average. And you, professor? What do you do with the freedom to inject and fuck with the deoxyribose backbone of the universe?'

Hojo watched his creation slide along the tile flooring. 'I get to plant little switches, dear President Shinra,' Hojo said. 'Little switches in their heads, and a microcosm in their blood. I like crossing lines, you see.' He reached out a hand and crooked a finger. His creation waved a tentacled reply. 'Beyond a liminal point, everything is unknown. You have to breach it to find out what comes after. Isn't that worth any sacrifice?'

'I'm talking to myself,' Rufus smiled. His fingers were dead and numb on the floor. A Mako-tinged wetness leaked towards his hand in a trail that led back to an open experiment containment unit. 'Doesn't that already tell you the answer?'

'Your eyes are very, very blue, President Shinra,' the professor said to Rufus as tentacled product of JENOVA and Shinra's alchemical science slid against Rufus skin. It curled itself along his limbs and searched for the tears in his body, following the smell of burnt carbon and red-liquid iron. Mako secretion stank and sang with putrid energy. The Lifestream is a cycle. Inevitable and inescapable, it absorbs and produces energy. The ultimate argument for karma: what goes around comes around.

Hojo was watching from above as Rufus fell downwards, in the right direction this time. The professor was reaching down to touch Rufus' eyelids, a fingernail running against the curve of fluttering lashes. 'I look forward to seeing them a little bit green.'

When they found Rufus Shinra in the wreckage, he was alive.


End file.
